'Never Before Noon': Vampires, sex, and no soul
Your parents, whom you despise, decide to end their lives. Oh, and they also disclose that they're vampires. But they're not altogether sure whether you're "like them." Those are the stakes in Joanne McLaughlin's new novel, one of the "new romance" novels in the vampire genre.
Never Before Noon
By Joanne McLaughlin
Eternal. 340 pp. $14.95 nolead ends
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Reviewed by Katherine Ramsland
nolead ends Your parents, whom you despise, decide to end their lives. Oh, and they also disclose that they're vampires. But they're not altogether sure whether you're "like them." Those are the stakes in Joanne McLaughlin's new novel, one of the "new romance" novels in the vampire genre.
By "new romance," I mean the post-Fifty Shades kind that includes regular bouts of heated sex, not the kind that arises from emotional need. There's a lot of bumping and grinding but not much connection. Vampire types today are more laconic than engaged, more suavely bored than full of the longing that transformed the genre with Anne Rice's vampires.
In Never Before Noon, you have the seduce-them-and-leave-them Chloe Hart, chased by handsome reporter Jackson Fahey. Both lie often and only sometimes wish they hadn't. Because they hop into bed upon meeting, you won't get romantic suspense. But there's certainly sex, art, and rock-and-roll, the stuff vampire novels are made of.
The tale starts with Chloe's parents, a pair of vampires who were famous rock stars. Dad looks, as you'd expect, like "every medieval artist's vision of Lucifer." Mom is also exquisite. When they explain their suicide plan, she absorbs the surprise and accepts her role: keeping their cover. This creates tension with reporter Jackson.
Vampire novels are popular in part because vampires are malleable creatures. The vampire narrative works best when it operates off the things we most crave, yet it never lets us fully possess them. The new vampire, whatever form it takes, will do what it does best: Get us close to the erotic forbidden. That never dies.
The vampire's flexibility lets authors put their personal stamp on their vampire universe, and McLaughlin, an Inquirer editor, has done so with a mystery attached to DNA. These days, a good investigative reporter is certainly going to figure out a way to get a sample for testing, so McLaughlin places DNA front and center. Yet the results don't necessarily satisfy.
In Never Before Noon, parents can't be trusted: They're manipulative, they're secretive, and they're narcissistic. They'll suck the life out of their kids. No wonder Chloe has trouble connecting. Then again, the man she wants is no better.
Those who know themselves in this novel are hardly worth knowing, but those who try to find their way through the secrecy, deception, and neglect will elicit empathy the way Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls did two decades ago. Darkness speaks to darkness.
Katherine Ramsland has published 58 books. Her latest are "The Ripper Letter" and "Confession of a Serial Killer."